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Miiverse, the social networking service introduced with the Wii U in 2012, will shut down in November, Nintendo announced today.

The service closes Wednesday, Nov. 8 at 1 a.m. ET. The news comes about a month after dataminers discovered text within a system update that pointed to the conclusion of Miiverse. Its fans have been mourning it in advance of today’s announcement.

Miiverse is the social space that greets Wii U owners when they boot up the console (provided it is connected to the Internet). It is meant for users to connect through the games they both play.

Miiverse at its best was a source of richly detailed, user-created images and hilarious posts in the vein of Weird Twitter. The Twitter account BadMiiversePosts was created four months after Miiverse’s launch to celebrate the worst (really best) of it, accruing a nice 69,000 followers since.

Well this is disappointing. I'm really shocked that there's no Miiverse equivalent on Switch. I feel like it would be successful there.

I hope everyone saves their drawings somehow.

The Switch is the first Nintendo system that feels like it would make sense to have all those extra applications on, but instead it has the least. Definitely a missed opportunity, although I imagine they are avoiding the Switch being compared to and seen as just another tablet. The media are not very imaginative, and consumers treating it as such would likely complain about a dearth of utilities no matter how well it was addressed. That besides, there is no way they could build a platform that serves that market without making it an open platform to some extent, and that would inevitably just make modding and piracy easier and diminish the perceived need for their software releases.

Strangely, I do not mind this nearly so much as I might. I would absolutely love to have the ability to directly tinker with virtualisation on that custom Tegra as I'm sure I could get it to do any number of things. That said, if their approach works well enough it will keep the company and public perception of their games in better shape, which means more Nintendo for us rubes in the long run. I just hope they actually manage to put the pedal down on their development and releases. There are games on Switch but it's not got a very exciting selection. The system is powerful enough that they should be able to do minor tweaks to their pre-Wii U backlog and release their whole library without sweating the strain of less-than-perfect code.